Naples '44 by Norman Lewis

anybody spoke to me.
    Esposito-Lau, the husband, was quiet and dignified. He told me he was being punished for his success in business, and I’m sure he was. Unfortunately these people knew only too well the hunger and the freezing cold the frail-looking little wife would face in the Filangieri prison. There was a wild rush round to find articles of warm clothing, and when these were not forthcoming I calmed the crisis by telling them that I would come back next day, collect any missing articles and deliver them in person to the prison.
    So I actually made some friends. One of the neighbours, a SignoraNorah Gemelli, turned out to have an Irish mother and to speak perfect English. She made tea and we talked about Dante, and the unpleasantness of war, and gradually the sobs subsided and the tears were dried, and the fragile little prisoner hugged her husband and her friends for the last time, and made ready to go.
December 9
    A day off on a remarkably fine Sunday for the season offered an opportunity for further acquaintance with the neighbourhood. Our surroundings provide a rare blend of grandeur and lower-class vivacity, the palaces among which we live having quite failed to keep the working man and his family at bay. From our front windows we look out over the formal gardens of the Villa Nazionale with their rare palms and their ranks of statues of the Greek heroes and gods, all of which have been contrived for the delight of the nobility of bygone generations, whereas the view from the office windows is straight into the fifteen-feet-high portone of the Calabritto Palace. Here, all the ground-floor rooms surrounding the vast courtyard, which is at once nursery, playground and market, have been taken over by small businesses: a clock-repairer, a maker of artificial flowers, a working cobbler, a tripe-boiler, a seamstress, and others. In this way the many families who share the palace have developed their enclosed little village whose inhabitants hardly ever bother to leave it, since most of their requirements can be dealt with on the spot.
    In my tour of the neighbourhood I found this social amalgam to be the normal thing; the poor and the rich in our rione live side by side, constantly rubbing elbows while appearing to be hardly conscious of each other’s presence. Fifty or sixty per cent of poor families occupy one windowless room, and have been bred to endure airless nights on the ground floors of the palazzi, or in gloomy, sunless back streets. The aristocrats who remain make do with about twenty rooms on one of the upper floors of their ancestral home, and for the most part, let off the rest. In the past everybody who could afford to do so lived on the Riviera di Chiaia, where the sun and the sea air and the palm-shaded gardensdefended them from the plagues and the poxes that constantly ravaged the labyrinthine city itself. Carraciolo, the hero of the Neapolitan republican insurrection, cold-bloodedly slaughtered by Nelson when our admiral intervened to put the effete Bourbon King back on the throne, lived a hundred yards away from our headquarters. I visited his family palace today, and found it the most charming of these great seafront buildings, with a small courtyard with a fountain flanked by Roman busts, marble cherubs and prancing horses, the total effect being almost playful in the gravity of the Neapolitan-Catalan architectural environment.
    Exactly opposite the Palazzo Carraciolo in the Villa Nazionale stands the now desolate aquarium in its grove of Judas trees and evergreen oaks, and I went there too. The Bay of Naples, said the sole remaining employee, was famous for its rare crustaceans and octopods, some of which were to be found nowhere else in the sea. They had had a unique collection of these, but they had all been fished out along with General Clark’s unhappy manatee, to go into the pot in the first days of the liberation. A few molluscs and sea-anemones had survived for a matter of days,